


woodstock in my mind

by geniewish



Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Character Development, Existential Angst, Jooheon centric, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Recreational Drug Use, Semi-Public Sex, Sexual Content, Smoking, america 60s, hippie hyungwon, long long haired hyungwon!!!!, pls do read a/n!!, politically motivated youth and thus so much thoughtTM, radical (no) activist changkyun, read this for the hippies, this is actually sweet i promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:08:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23982082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geniewish/pseuds/geniewish
Summary: jooheon is yearning for the peace of mind, but not the kind of peace hyungwon preaches and changkyun fights for.it was the summer of 1969, and love and music seemed like the only salvation to all of the world's problems. seemed like.
Relationships: Chae Hyungwon/Im Changkyun | I.M, Chae Hyungwon/Im Changkyun | I.M/Lee Jooheon, Chae Hyungwon/Lee Jooheon, Im Changkyun | I.M/Lee Jooheon
Comments: 5
Kudos: 30





	woodstock in my mind

**Author's Note:**

> aight lads, im trying out a totally different style w this one and worked pretty hard to make it work so hope u like it!!
> 
> psa, its a historical fic, meaning i didnt live through that time, so despite having done a pretty sufficient research, events/things/sentiments may not be accurate!! this is just for fun so do forgive me if they didnt call the TV, a TV back in the days
> 
>  **warning!:** when i say drug use, i mean it happens throughout the fic, specifically weed, as well as an instance of lsd. one scene describes a pretty detailed acid trip so do proceed w caution! this is not what the fic is centred around tho but im still issuing a warning okay!!
> 
> the song reference list is in the end notes! u can check it out now or after or throughout, it's not crucial, just for the mood n poetry meguesses c: the title is taken from lana del rey - coachella - woodstock in my mind! maybe you'll find a clue in that song too :>
> 
> thank u aiden so much for beta reading for me and leaving ur honest opinion!!! 
> 
> hope you enjoy!! do tell me if you do teary eyed pleading emoji

The peculiar year of 1969. 

The year that will go down in history. Maybe not in the grand scheme of things just yet, but in Jooheon’s life for sure.

Nixon is inaugurated the new president of the United States, banks inflate, troops withdraw from Vietnam – or plan to, at least – antiwar protests create trends, Neil Armstrong conquers the moon, John Lennon marries Yoko Ono, The Beatles record their last album, and Jooheon finds his first love, and not just one, but two, at that.

Maybe one day he will start his memoirs with this exact phrasing. But on a boring, viscous, abysmal, capitally and capitalistically free Friday afternoon none of the sweet words of sweet emotion want to form on his tongue.

Ramble of the daily news is a beating to his eardrums, monotone narrations swimming in the irony of the happenings they inform about, come on, let the people know of the state they have found themselves in, who died today? Not the president, but that’s okay, someone else’s president will die some next month, God loves the Americans, he won’t let them rot in democracy. 

Weather forecasts, sunny, oh, thank you, now be a sweetheart and raise the storm of dust in our stuffy New York, dress the ladies in flippy skirts and flower prints, we don’t care, we have jeans and penny loafers and go-go boots, and we are not afraid to use them. 

The Village is hot, and Jooheon’s coffee is hot, and the news on the television are burning with sensations and blood, and when Changkyun pushes the front door of the coffee house open, it’s steaming. Every new room he greets with a bear-like shrug of leather-clad shoulders, his short legs take up more space than needed – three, four, five square black and white tiles between his feet. He thinks greasers are still the shit, his hair gelled in quiffs and eyes brimmed with an angry squint. He is always like that – angry, frustrated, occupying more space than he should, silently shouting for the whole world to hear, I am here! I am me! He revs like a motor and breaks out with a pump. 

When he pulls the chair back, it screeches against the tiles. Changkyun nods in Jooheon’s direction and sits down, his eyes down, down and eyeing the newspaper on the table. “Bastards,” he says as a greeting and turns to the TV in the corner. They said they would cease the drafts and retrieve, and yet the youths are still dying in Saigon. 

Reporters, reporters, Hollywood faces and Los Angeles mansions, guesses and facts, and no one really cares about it. 

“Hollywood tragedy, my ass,” Changkyun says. The actress was heavily pregnant when she was murdered. Jooheon has never heard of her, her name on the news is deafened by the beating of ‘stabbed, stabbed, stabbed’ against his ears. 

Changkyun takes out a pack of cigarettes and smokes. He exhales with a soughing noise, smoke rushes out of his small mouth in thin veils. He holds the cigarette between his pointer and middle fingers, flicks the ashes off carelessly with his thumb, some splatter on the table, some barely reach the ashtray in the middle. Jooheon reaches for the pack, unceremoniously takes out one too. 

He watches the TV with disgust on his face. “The rich have always been the problem. They will start accusing commoners of murders they didn’t commit, blame the lower-class jealousy, grab their purses and kids and look down and shun us like some scums of the earth. And it was probably just some psychos with God complex, hippies or freaks that think they deserve better.”

Telling Changkyun to shut up is in vain. Jooheon has gotten used to listening, to the ramble of the TV, to the rumble of Changkyun’s rage, to the mumbles of stoners around the streets, to the spitting of the senators and plattles of the presidents, to the cuckoos of Christians and the chiffchaffs of anarchists, to the beat poetry of the beatniks and the slam of the protesters. 

Jooheon hears it all, and Changkyun’s smoke seeps into him with his own, fills him out, burning, crawling into his head and tugging onto the little nerve ending in his fingertips. Changkyun breathes loudly, his chest rises and falls, his stomach inflates, and his jaws keep moving, clenching, gritting, his fingers roll the cigarette and flick, roll and flick, his feet beat a silent rhythm against the floor tired, his thighs jerk. The heat on his jacket trembles, the sheen of summer on his skin glimmers. Only his hard-gelled hair stays still when Changkyun whips his head towards Jooheon and leans on the table. 

The endless tick inside Jooheon’s mind stops. 

“I got the tickets to the festival, we’re taking your car?”

Changkyun’s consonants are sharp edges and slaps on the cheek, his vowels are thin and hollow, his mouth is crooked, rising more on the left side when he speaks. He is uneven, unsymmetrical, unstable inside out, except his eyes glint like matches, only dulling for a second when the smoke washes over his face. 

“Why mine?” Jooheon puffs out.

“Because I got us the tickets and food, Hyungwon got pot, and you’re doing nothing. We’re taking your car.” 

Changkyun stamps the cigarette butt into the ashtray, turns back to the TV, sniffs. There’s more Nixon, but it seems like after inserting his two cents, Changkyun is calmer, moving less, concentrating on watching. Socialists? Fuck them! say communists. Communists? Kill them! say Americans. Growing antiwar sentiments. Growing? You must be new here, welcome to the real world.

Changkyun sniffs as a way of wasting energy. His body is rippling, radiating transmitters. Ground Control to Major Tom, can you hear me? He could be heard even if he wasn’t moving.

***

The silence that falls upon them as soon as their breaths calm down is unnerving, it settles with Hyungwon’s slobbish form but is unsettling in Jooheon’s chest. There are white curtains and white sheets, white light seeps through the window but it’s not the sun, it’s the clouds brighter than the toothpaste they advertize. Hyungwon’s breaths are now slow, his eyelids don’t flutter but swing, his bare chest rises on the count of four. It takes a bar for his skin to stretch over his ribs, and it takes another for his ribs to fall back into place. 

It’s so quiet that it rings in Jooheon’s ears, the ring like a war siren spreading across his skull – over the globe, whee, up, up, up, and then whoo, down, down, down, trembling, screeching, so unsettling. Air raid! Everyone down! And Jooheon can’t go any lower for his body is stuck to the sheets, sweating not from exertion but from civil silence. 

Hyungwon seems asleep, but there is always a curl of a smile glued to his lips like a mole. He thinks his pillows are heavenly clouds, and his bedsheets – silk of god, and even when the sun is hiding behind the skyscrapers, he absorbs the day like a plant. His hand leisurely slides up and down the middle of his torso, the tip of his dusty finger leaving no mark, no sound. Sometimes it feels like his breathing grows even slower. 

Jooheon sighs a little louder than the silence allows, and it seems to bring Hyungwon out of his sleepless slumber. He shifts, rising on his elbows, his long-long curls of black hair falling on his shoulder blades and tickling the pillows. He reaches for the bedside table, takes a half-finished joint and lights it. His steel lighter is long past its prime, dull and grey instead of the initial silver it once glimmered with. The cracking of the smouldering paper finally breaks the conservative silence. The daylight’s smell grows psychedelic. 

“I’m gonna head out,” Jooheon says, sitting up. He curses himself for being a workaholic, in Hyungwon’s and Changkyun’s terms. He goes to the garage every other day to fix old cars – shitty, but he doesn’t mind; his stance of ‘doesn’t mind’ is the stance against what Changkyun beats him over about every single day, fuck them, fuck you, fuck your employers, fuck the people in power, reject authority, set the motherfucking cars on fire, for all I care!

If he set the motherfucking cars on fire, Hyungwon wouldn’t be able to snuggle into these heavenly soft sheets in blissful high. 

In response, Hyungwon exhales a puff of smoke and swirls the corners of his lip just a little bit further. There are dips on his chin that appear when he smiles. “How long you’re gone for?”

His voice melts into the quiet, sleepy murmurs that take longer than necessary to leave his mouth. His consonants flow into one, his vowels flow into them and trickle out of his mouth like syrup out of an opened bottle, slowly, as if time doesn’t exist, as if Hyungwon can afford to close his eyes for several seconds a blink.

“Until evening. You can stay here if you want.”

Jooheon gets out of bed and starts looking for his clothes. Hyungwon’s tunics pile on the backs of the chairs, his trousers are now the foot of the bed, his little scarfs and beads and stones and bands are the frame of the mirror, he is the lining of the room, except his sandals are mixing with Changkyun’s sneakers on the floor. Jooheon’s loafers are toeing a leg of the table under Changkyun’s print shirt. 

Hyungwon smokes. Jooheon is long used to the flick of the ashes, a pointer finger tapping whenever the pointer finger itches to do so. It’s his rustling, his zipping, his buttoning, and Hyungwon is slugging in the sheets as if he doesn’t exist at all. The smell of his weed fills the silent air; it’s helping. The siren in Jooheon’s ear has quietened. 

“Goonie is reading beat in the center tomorrow. Ditch the cars, come over,” Hyungwon says, tone too languid to be inviting but the words speak for themselves, longer than most of what he usually says after sex. Take away his high and pleasure and he is a candidate, except the comparison makes him loathe his own outspokenness, so he feeds and feeds into the highs and pleasures until his mouth loses its designated functions. It doesn’t always work, to someone else’s chagrin.

Jooheon slides into his shoes and approaches the bed. “I’ll see.” He leans in to kiss Hyungwon on the lips. He touches the smoke and flower petals, Hyungwon’s mouth too lazy to pucker for a proper kiss. It relaxes back into its ever-smiling curl, and Jooheon straightens. He will see. The center is an underground apartment of one of their Yippies, the poetry they read is the pompous circumstance of their impromptu smoke-ins that lack any actual pomp and circumstance. 

Hyungwon nods him a goodbye with his eyelids. In his irises is the summer of love, the one he still lives in, and carelessly, rare heavy ashes fall on his stomach. 

*** 

The radio blabbers endlessly from morning to morning. When his boss is around, it’s entertainment shows with a cackling host and stupid guests. Today Jooheon learns how to cheat on the lottery, what to do if your chicken lays yolk instead of baby chicks and vice versa, how Neil Armstrong cut his hair on the Moon (there is a pun), and whether we should expect the coming of the second Great Depression – just in case. In case the war takes out too much of our taxes. 

If they have clients, they change the station. Some listen to stock markets (Jooheon silently snickers to himself because what, if not the Great Depression, is the topic for laughing malice), some listen to prices of new home appliances, some listen to a football game, or worse – baseball. 

Jooheon is polishing a scratch on a green Ford 1968 when Kihyun comes out of the back room and tosses a dirty cloth on the tool table. He is also a kid of immigrants, they live in Chinatown and sell pastries, and sometimes, when Kihyun is feeling kind enough, normally on a cold day, he brings Jooheon an egg tart or honey cookies. 

He turns on the news. “The motherfucker refused to pay for new tires because he ‘didn’t believe he punctured them’,” Kihyun says and sighs, taking a swing of beer out the bottle. 

“And what did you do?”

“Charged him double for the rusty engine,” Kihyun puts down the drink, paces across the garage and lies down on the creeper, uses his feet to lightly push himself back and forth. He stares at the steel ceiling and huffs loudly at nothing in particular. It’s strange that it doesn’t irritate Jooheon, it’s strange that Jooheon is working to the static discussion about welfare aids and Nixon propaganda and doesn’t have the heart to kick Kihyun in the nuts. 

“You’re not gonna help me?” Jooheon is the most himself when he is on his own, or so he encourages himself to believe, like his mother taught him to believe in God when he was little. In the span of two months, ‘his own’ came from lonely nights in his room to busy days without Hyungwon and Changkyun, but that’s barely a pleasant change, though some might say it is. Maybe he doesn't like the himself that he turns into when he is on his own. When he is on his own, he doesn’t have the heart for anger, doesn’t have the hunger for freedom, doesn’t have the mind for a better life. Though, is that really him?

There are words and foam-made sounds hitting against his ear drums that spark nothing but irritation. At himself? he wonders. At the world, too. At hot summer days. At his dirty jumpsuit that smells like oil. That’s him.

“I will,” Kihyun says. “When it comes to me.”

Kihyun says he wants to go busking around the states singing about the simple-mindedness of people and failed revolutions. He does nothing to help, he just sits and observes and writes tunes on his guitar, Donovan-wannabe, sometimes about love, sometimes about pretty girls he meets in bars, sometimes about romantic sunrises and depressing rainfalls. Everyone is an artist these days. Even Jooheon. 

“You’re going to the music festival this weekend?” he asks.

“No. There’s another one in Harlem. I heard Nina Simone is singing.” 

“Well, then. Have fun.” Jooheon takes off his gloves and approaches the tool table, takes a gulp of the same beer. It’s warm and the mouth of the bottle is wet.

“You too.” Kihyun fills his cheeks with air and opens his mouth with a hollow pop, exhaling everything at once. It could be a breathing exercise he does to control his temper. Maybe Jooheon should suggest it to Changkyun. Maybe he should try it himself. 

For temper? That's barely a temper. But when there is no right definition to what he’s feeling, thousands of other questions arise, what is it then? Internalised exuberance? He isn’t Hyungwon.

He looks at Kihyun and feels strange existential angst bubbling in his guts, a sudden loss of direction. He has hourly pay, Hyungwon doesn’t, Changkyun hates it. He has an apartment, Hyungwon likes to warm up seats in his friends’ psychedelic pseudo-artistic van, and Changkyun is hoarding his belongings in a single room in Queens he inherited from his late parents. Jooheon has no clue about what to do with any of it, the savings, abandoned degree, endless videotapes of his favorite musicians, and maybe that’s the problem. He should’ve become an engineer, like his sister told him.

But he seems to see more of the world around him with the blind third eye on his forehead, while his guitar gently weeps. 

***

“They say we are the children of victory, prosperity and progress,  
They say that we are the trees whose roots hold the earth together, the birds that brighten up the sky with a song, the stars that show stray travellers their way back home;  
They say we are success, security and wealth,  
We are the future of the chivalry and the modesty of knights,  
We are the luminary of goodness, the good example, the good virtue,  
Even though virtue is goodness of rights.  
They have never been more mistaken.  
We are the children of slaughter, discrimination and impurity,  
We are the degradation in the eyes of higher men, the disgrace of god from a picture book, the damage to the socium, communion, union, dominion, authority, sovereignty and regime;  
They say they prophesied the future, but we are the messiahs of our truths,  
They say they moulded freedom, but we are the embodiment of liberty,  
They say they are the orthodoxy, but, baby, we are the protest; in the light of day, we are the protest; in the darkness of the night, we are the protest, in the cracks on your ceiling, in the holes of your shirt, in the waste of your dinner, we are the protest.  
Where they lied fraternity, we screamed segregation,  
Where they built democracy, we wailed in the war,  
Where they cried wolf, we butchered their sheep;  
They call us druggies, prostitutes, schizophrenics, apes, tramps, occultists, anarchists, and rats, but, baby,  
They have never been more mistaken.  
We are the children of the carnage, genocide, bloodlust,  
We are the children that raised from out prenatally dug out graves to defy our origins,  
We are the children not of God, not of Satan, not of Allah, Brahma, Amaterasu, Prometheus, Ra or anyone them pagans can think of;  
No one knows what the fuck we are, or what we are supposed to be, or where we will go;  
They will guide us, but we will divert;  
They will beat us, but we will burn their crosses,  
They will never, ever fucking listen, but that’s why we scream in agony in our sleep, so that when the night is silent, and they are numb from old age, and the calamity has long become tranquility, we will hold a pillow over their heads.”

Changkyun takes a few seconds to catch his breath. He grumbles a thanks from his place on the makeshift podium and steps down, a cigarette swiftly trapped between his fingers. Hyungwon’s frizzy head finds rest on Jooheon’s shoulder, his nest of hair is ticklish on his cheek. He passes the joint, Jooheon takes it before Changkyun smuggles it first. 

More words come, more words fill the room with resent, hope, fear, hatred, love, spirit, soul, sweet and bitter emotion, and yet the slap and spit of Changkyun’s words still strums rock against Jooheon’s drums. Where Changkyun sits next to Hyungwon, rough patched-up jeans angling into rough unpatched bell-bottoms, he is trembling. Easy, rider, the moment is gone. 

Jooheon passes him the joint. Changkyun inhales, the ring of amber flares, smouldering, eating, turning to ashes, smoke rushes down his throat, scalding, and then the end of the brown paper is black bones. Changkyun exhales noisily, breathily, airily, a whispering wind, a fire long extinguished still blowing for its revenge. Changkyun was born with revenge, and no amount of head rushes can chase it out of him. 

Frail hand reaches for the joint, beaded bracelets around it beat against each other. Hyungwon smokes and shifts, the flutter of his crispy blouse a ghostly caress against Jooheon’s side. Hyungwon stretches his legs in front of him, the wide bottoms of his trousers ride up to the middle of his thin calves. His toes are dirty, the soles of his sandals are dusty, the colourful bracelet around his bony ankle is missing a few beads. 

Changkyun had given it to him.

A pilgrimage to San Francisco, a bike trip across the states, a flower child among his fellow bohemian masses, a militant leading the anti-war marches, and they called it the summer of love, free love, free sex, free drugs, and they were neither birds nor worms. Distinctions didn’t exist as long as their mouths could open, as long as George Harrison had tunes to play, as long as the peacemaking slogans, for once, were hanging over both of their heads, and they made love, not war. 

The summer of ‘67 saw Hyungwon and Changkyun tie their wrists together with a band made of plucked daisies. A journey back to New York, a split into birds and worms was inevitable, and yet the distinction never brought them closer to the animal kingdom. They played The Beatles on an ill guitar, preached peace and cried power, while Jooheon’s face was covered in soot and grease as he slammed close yet another burned hood. Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to? Oh, Lord, Jooheon cried out, don’t you know I need you?

The Lord didn’t meet him at the sea.

The Lord came two summers later in a puff of smoke and meaningless cries of resent. Nothing ever changes. And the world won’t change, and the poetry won’t salvage the wandering souls, and the flags of peace won’t be raised in the air. Fifty stars won’t turns upside down and grow horns, red stripes won’t bleed into the white stripes, and, really, nothing will change, and the Lord won’t hear him pray, and maybe all of this sucks, but the presence of something warm by his side makes him think that, maybe, he doesn’t mind looking at the stars while they’re still there. 

“Have you ever been to a beach in California?” Hyungwon’s murmur reaches Jooheon’s ears through the haze of reading. Changkyun’s head is thrown back, eyes closed, throat column bent at a sharp angle. A cigarette is wasting away in his hand.

“No,” Jooheon replies.

“During the day, the ocean beach is crowded to the brim. You won’t park your car by the cliffside, it’s like when you get out, all you see is a layer of metal roofs and steam coming off them, as if someone sprinkled tea on them. It’s not really because it’s hot, it’s just that when people come, they stay. You dig a little pit in some secluded corner, somewhere away from the viewing dock, so that they know you will light a bonfire later. You know when you get high and it seems like the world is a little bit smaller than it actually is? From the pit to where the sand is wet, it should take enough steps to set your feet on fire, but for some reason it never does, and when you look into the distance, you feel like the water is sand and sand is water, and it’s hard to tell the actual sun from the reflection on your beer. They’d already removed the pier by then, so if you want to get in the water, you can’t roll up your pants. You should’ve taken your pants off in the beginning because you sweat. When wet clothing clings to your skin, it’s cold, a little like a lashing whip, except it moves from above your knee to your stomach where it’s cold the most, and then to your chest and your arms, so you really have to remember to take off your clothes before you go in. It’s a little hard to see the end, no matter whether you swim towards the beach or towards the ocean, it feels like the end of the world, like you are stuck in an iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic, right where the Titanic sank, except you are as far away from the tragedy as possible. It’s the only place in the world where the time is stuck, even if your eyes slowly follow the sun as it goes down. When it gets darker, people leave, but some people stay, and we light bonfires and write shitty songs, which we eventually throw into the flames so they can burn like the reminders of this moment. If you stare into the fire long enough, you start to see yourself, your own mind, memories, thoughts and morals burning away into the night so that you can wake up some next day and not worry about the damn iceberg of the world, because you melted it. It doesn’t fucking matter if the Titanic crashed into it, because to you, it’s water in the ocean. The more water there is, the more Titanics there are, and eventually all of them will be under. Just promise to take off your pants when you get in, because it hurts like a bitch if you don’t.”

Two beatniks-wannabes have gone through their performances as Hyungwon spoke – murmured, his voice like a bowl of wet leaves that keeps slowly getting mixed and mixed and mixed until the leaves are a paste for your pasta dressing. Jooheon assumes there is some kind of deep meaning hiding behind the allegories. Jooheon labels them as unimportant because Hyungwon is high and secretive and mused, and it’s pointless trying to crack his secrets because he himself forgets what those secrets are. 

They finish the joint among the three of them. Jooheon’s butt grows numb from sitting ceaselessly on the dusty wooden floor.

***

Screaming kids are crowding around the counter, bags of candy getting crumpled in their sweaty hands, coins clinking and falling on the floor in the gnomesque mosh pit, the register is going _ching!_ and yet the line doesn’t get any smaller.

Changkyun is raiding a bubble gum machine. “So we should leave no later than five a.m., man. I heard a guy in my block saying they’re leaving tonight.” 

Jooheon extends him another dime on the palm. Changkyun grabs it blindly, shoves the coin into the machine and turns the handle. He receives five gumballs this time, two of them red. “Oh, yes, baby,” he tosses the red balls in his mouth and pockets the other. Unceremoniously grabs another dime from Jooheon’s loose palm. 

“It’s dumb, man. The festival doesn’t start until Friday, I can’t take these many days off work.”

Changkyun is concentrated on the gum machine like it’s about to make the decision of his life and death. His forefinger is tapping on the glass, outgrown nail making a light yet unnerving sound. Some kids gather around the neighboring machine, but it’s unlikely they can afford to spin the handle more than once, so by the time Changkyun breathes in and out, grips the handle, twists it with fury of a sword fighter, and finally receives whole six gumballs in his palm, the kids are gone after a victorious squeal. They only get three. Changkyun throws the only red gum he got and pockets the rest. 

“Fuck your work, Jooheon. Tell that other guy to take your shift, I don’t fucking care, we are getting to the farm by Wednesday morning and setting up the tents. Hyungwon’s still convinced Dylan might show up.”

Changkyun’s pockets are stuffed with now melting gumballs, so he scans the shop for more sugar to steal. He would steal, but as soon as his hand reaches into the jar with gummy strips, Jooheon quirks an eyebrow and, thankfully, Changkyun notices. He sighs and rolls his eyes, irritated, frustrated, angry and enraged, like a burning blade in the blacksmith’s workshop, but takes a paper bag anyways. 

He throws in fireball candy – masochistic tendencies; picks three different sizes of jawbreakers, including the biggest one, the one that fits in his entire palm; he picks out exclusively red and purple rock candy, red and purple pop rocks, endless piles of red and purple gummies, and, after a second of contemplation, adds a few edible necklaces.

The counter is less crowded, Changkyun towers over the kids, seems to not notice them at all. There’s beads of sweat gathered under the short hair on his nape – exactly what he gets for wearing leather jackets in summer. 

Ecstatic children waste their coins on sugar and leave with smiles full of genuine joy, and maybe they’re the reason why Changkyun keeps exhaling loudly through his nose, watching their polished shoes carelessly tapping the tiles, their immaculate shorts inflating with bagfuls of candy, their hair perfectly brushed by the barbers. Careless little bastards.

“You got a quarter?” Changkyun asks. And, really, how is he any different from them?

Jooheon has to take a mind-cleansing breath before extending Changkyun the money. “Get a job.” He tells him this every other week, and every other week Changkyun scoffs and empties his wallet.

“I have a job, for you to know.” 

The cashier gives him his bag with a polite smile. They turn around to leave, and Changkyun’s restless claw is already shoving inside. “Writing songs is not a job if you don’t get paid for it.” And with his attitude, Changkyun wishes he can play at the Bitter End. Not that he isn’t good; he just needs to deal with the fact that recognition comes from selling parts of yourself to the people. 

Outside, Changkyun spits the chewing gum on the pavement with a huff, his cheeks flattering as he does so. “Art is free.”

There are things that come out of his mouth that sound like Hyungwon, his dreamy assurances in the utopia that will come if they resist long enough. Resist, not fight. His long frail hands move in a strange puppet manner when he, Hyungwon, says that, his eyes wander to the side and his mouth is opened, as if he hates the smell of the streets, as if mentally, he is still talking to the idols in his head, as if on instinct he is breathing out puffs of smoke. 

Changkyun makes Hyungwon’s words sound like an idea that, if you really think about it, might be something worth fighting for. Fight, not cower. Hyungwon repeats Changkyun’s words by muffling them with his mouth on his. Those are the rare moments when Jooheon agrees with the sudden tranquility.

“I don’t get what’s so good about those,” Jooheon says when Changkyun tosses the smallest jawbreaker in his mouth. 

Changkyun’s jaws and cheeks move in a way that makes Jooheon snicker as he’s trying his best to suck on it. His hooded eyelids aren’t helping, his expression is comic, a true tribute to America’s greatest. He shoves it aside behind one cheek, making it bulge. “They last for, like, an eternity.”

They also keep Changkyun quiet. 

Greenwich Village is bearable in summer. It’s all cars and five-storey houses with fire escape stairs, it’s loud but not enough to drive Jooheon insane. There’s chatter by the newstands where Changkyun stops to skim through The Times, there’s glue and ugly scraps of paper on the brick walls where Changkyun tears off announcement, there are coffee houses and bars where Changkyun kicked the tables during riots and police raids. 

They stop by the electronics shop, where the display with TVs show various programs. There’s news from Europe, because there’s always news from Europe, because they are no better than the nominal dreamland of America, but at least they bring the endless riots somewhere else. To bring the world to one absolute order, is their ultimate goal, everyone’s ultimate goal, and the vein on Changkyun’s neck starts to twitch in anger whenever he sees the faces of the absolute. 

“Think about it. If the same masses of people that got the tickets to see Jimi Hendrix got up and stood against the authority, we could have a chance at bringing them down,” Changkyun says. His eyes are focused on the screen, arms folded in front of his chest. Only his jaws keep moving sloppily around the hard candy ball.

“The March on Washington gathered two hunderd thousand people,” Jooheon says. Marches with a clear purpose serve good, marches under supervision mean you get to live another day, marches that unite and advocate for human rights bring hope and peace of mind, and Lord forgive him for the only peace he truly strives for is the one for his soul. 

“Whatever.” Changkyun means to ramble on but averts his gaze from the TV towards the street and marches on. He thinks in actions and doesn’t know the word consequences, he is heated like the back of his leather jacket and refuses to see anything but his truth. His truth, his fight, his own inner riot, and maybe when he was a child his fists proved him more than his words did, and maybe when he was a teen he realised that neither grant him the freedom he thirsts for, and maybe right now, at the back of his mind, he still knows it but refuses to accept it because if he does, what is left of him? If he stops fighting, what’s the point in getting by through the endless depression of less fortunate folks?

So what they won the war. So what their papas and mamas scavenged the wasteland behind the Queensboro Bridge. They are the children of carnage, he said so himself, they’ve been wronged since the day they were born, doesn’t mean they should follow in steps of their migrating ancestors. Come gather ‘round, people! his soul yearns to scream, the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a-changin’!

If only they really changed.

“You’re packing your bags tonight, alright?” Changkyun says and rips open a pack of pop rocks. Red. He throws his head back and pours the entire content right into his mouth. Even from a foot’s distance Jooheon can hear them crack on his tongue. 

“Alright,” he agrees. If he doesn’t agree, he will be dragged out of his bed by force in nothing but his undergarments, and it is possibly the only violent thing Hyungwon will ever do in his life. 

***

The sky starts glowing in huey blues when they leave Jooheon’s place. In his blue little Volkswagen K70, driving past blue streets and blue windows, Jooheon is sleepy but conscious. Hyungwon’s ill guitar is perched on the passenger seat, their timid luggage of spare clothes and barely a few days worth of snacks is tumbling around in the tiny trunk. Hyungwon didn't even pack a hair brush.

New York is a ghost town so early in the morning, it takes nothing to leave Manhattan and drive onto the highway leading upstate. The whistle of the road fills the radio silence. Leaving his window barely ajar, Jooheon breathes in the cool breeze – the last intake of fresh air he will get in days. There is no way he is coming home until next Monday, and maybe he should put on the radio to silence his own anxious mind but then the comfort finds him when he catches a whiff of weed through his nose. Hyungwon’s brought enough pot to last them a week. 

In the backseat, Changkyun’s hand is resting on Hyungwon’s knee. He isn’t sleeping – he barely sleeps on a normal day, and this sunrise is one among many sunrises he’s witnessed. The sun is practically over the horizon, enough to paint the sky in white but not high enough to peek over the trees and blind stray travellers.

Hyungwon is awake too. Being awake is not his favorite state of mind, he’d rather get lost in psychedelic thoughts of utopia than pace around the prison of reality, but maybe the monotone scenery brings him a special kind of peace.

It’s a sudden realisation that right now, with both boys quiet together, with rhythmic farts of the motors, constant whirr of the tires and gentle hushing of the breeze, Jooheon feels at peace. It’s a calm before the storm, a momentary illusion, but he holds onto it because it’s unlikely anything like this will ever happen again. 

It’s an idyll. In those blissful times, it seems like they could almost be a family – they could almost be normal people. Maybe the equal rights Changkyun rips his guts out for won’t ever be recognized, and maybe the liberal society Hyungwon believes in won’t build up on non-monogamy, and maybe Changkyun will get beaten to death by the police, and maybe Hyungwon will jump off the roof during one of his trips, and maybe having both of them by his side kind of sucks, but they never denied being Jooheon’s, and that puts him at ease.

The light breeze that sneaks into the salon featherly-softly flutters Hyungwon’s curls. Pale fingers on one hand absently fiddle with the beads of the bracelet around the other wrist, shiftlessly spinning them on the thread. The more time passes, the more conscious the look in his eyes becomes, and it’s almost unsettling. Almost, because on the seat next to him, peering into the opposite window, Changkyun looks tranquil. There’s never peace in his tensing cheeks, or slightly frowning brows, or rhythmically tapping finger, but for once his jacket is there to keep him warm, and Jooheon knows he will disregard it later on. 

“Is it bad that I wanna take acid before we get to the farm?” Hyungwon asks, turning to Changkyun, the corners of his mouth immediately curling upwards as he speaks. 

“We’re not that far off, man, you’re gonna spoil the trip if you do it in the car,” Changkyun replies and turns to him too. They’re just looking at each other for a while, not saying a word, and Hyungwon turns a little mellow, as if Changkyun is singing him Nancy Sinatra to sleep. “What, you bored?”

Hyungwon shrugs sluggishly, barely raising his shoulders. “A little.” He leans back in his seat, looking into nothingness ahead. 

“There’s other things we can do.” It’s then when Changkyun’s voice turns suggestive, as if he were a local heartbreaker, a little James Dean-wannabe, a strange gentle flirt that’s so different from the boy that kicks garbage cans in the streets. 

Hyungwon’s head falls to his side again, his mouth forms a tiny smile, his eyes are languid but not without a twinkle of mirth. “We can?” It’s not the need for reassurance he is expressing because he knows Changkyun’s tricks inside out, it’s the confirmation that whatever other things Changkyun’s offering, Hyungwon’s hopping on the train.

Changkyun reaches for a kiss, which Hyungwon meets barely half-way – Changkyun is leaning over half of the backseat, while Hyungwon all but cranes his neck to be a little closer to the other boy. Jooheon watches them through the rear-view mirror but doesn’t say anything yet. They’re kissing, loud smooches and lazy tongues, and Hyungwon still manages to smile right into it. Changkyun’s hand is cradling the side of his face, Hyungwon’s hands get lost somewhere in the folds of Changkyun’s massive tie-dyed t-shirt.

The way they kiss is no different from the way they live. Changkyun works with his tongue like it’s the first and last kiss he will ever receive, like a kiss is something he needs to fight in to win, even if there are no winners or losers in sex. Hyungwon lets him roam however he wants, instead taking control into his hands and hugging Changkyun around the waist, grabbing, squeezing, whatever he can do when he is not numb. 

There are sounds of clothes rustling, belts unbuckling, light chuckles escaping busy lips, and Jooheon should be looking at the road, but there are Changkyun’s fingers sneaking into the waistband of Hyungwon’s light, pajama-style pants, and Hyungwon’s fingers working nimbly around the buttons of Changkyun’s jeans. 

Jooheon grips the steering wheel tighter. He has always spoken of the peace too soon. “Hey, hey!” he exclaims when Changkyun drags Hyungwon’s member out and starts pumping it to full hardness. And they keep kissing and kissing, except this time Changkyun grins into the other guy’s mouth too, grins like he won the best fight of his life – Jooheon’s patience. 

“I think Jooheon is jealous,” Hyungwon murmurs, teasing in the most lighthearted way possible. He mirrors Changkyun, his hand now working up and down his dry length, and Jooheon should definitely keep his eyes on the road or pull over or speed up and come to a sudden stop so they tumble off their fucking seats, but instead he glances into the rearview mirror every other second and watches them get each other off. 

He should be used to it. But maybe it hasn’t been that long since the summer began.

They start shifting now, restless, they are sloppy and awkward and hot like the California beaches Hyungwon wouldn’t stop talking about. They hum roughly into the kiss, uh, mm, kiss, uh, mm, kiss, uh, uh, mm, kiss, and kiss, and again, and again, and Changkyun is suddenly sensitive and on edge.

He throws one leg over Hyungwon’s thighs, and Hyungwon gracelessly tries to move in his seat to face him, but it’s all clumsy and uncoordinated, and they don’t even care. Only their hands working rhythmically over each other. 

“Don’t dirty my seats,” Jooheon warns, and it’s exactly what they do. Changkyun’s sneakers-clad feet push into the edges of the seat and leave grey smudges on the door handle. He starts leaning back, beckoning Hyungwon with him, on top of him, over him, until he is barely fitting in the backseat, knees between Changkyun’s legs. 

His bent elbow is his only support, the thick bush of hair covers his entire face and Changkyun’s too, yet Jooheon can hear them kiss and kiss endlessly. Changkyun starts moaning. Deeply, quietly, with characteristic raspiness, and Hyungwon catches it all with his lips as his hand speeds up. It’s getting harder to drive stably, little sounds of pleasure and dampened skin on skin now shooting from his ears down, sexual liberation? Yes, please, love whomever you please, whenever you please, however you please, but don’t you keep conscious of wherever? A slam on the breaks, and maybe you never get to make love again. 

But Jooheon never has the heart to fight, and he might as well hold it in. Changkyun’s t-shirt is pulled up to his chest, Hyungwon hides his face in the crook of his neck, probably kissing, probably sucking a bruise, his mouth restless without cigarettes, and Jooheon’s mouth is restless too. There’s no reason why he isn’t saying anything and just lets them be, but it’s a sexual liberation, they say, it’s the only world revolution they can bring into their inner circle, just the three of them.

Hyungwon’s hand is curiously furious for his malnourished bones, bringing Changkyun to his release, finishing onto his stomach. Rolling the t-shirt to his chest was in vain if Hyungwon’s tunic flows off his torso and tickles Changkyun’s skin, almost wipes the spunk off with its hem, almost embraces Hyungwon’s own release if it wasn’t for the other boy’s hands. Changkyun just sort of tugs his cock in a hasty manner, as if he’s lost control of his hands, or maybe it’s the position that makes it uncomfortable, or maybe Hyungwon is too long over him to be easily accessible, but it works. Hyungwon bucks his hips into the hold, his pants fluttering with every movement he makes.

Then they kiss again, and Hyungwon’s hand, the one that jerked Changkyun off, is now pressed into the seat next to Changkyun’s head. Jooheon sighs, aggressively. The road leads to the left, and he takes the sharpest turn, and the two finally fall apart. 

Hyungwon flies backwards, his bones slam against the door, and he still smiles, chuckles even, looks at a still plastered Changkyun with mellow glee. Changkyun, for once, looks like a well-fed hedgehog, harmless. Until he tucks himself back in his jeans and uses the hem of his t-shirt to wipe the stains. And what was the fucking point, Lord tell him. Changkyun throws the back of Jooheon’s head a deadly glance but scrambles himself back into a seating position. 

Jooheon doesn’t pay attention to his boner, it’ll bone out, like everything does. He isn’t even that angry about the seats. Maybe it’s just abandonment issues and a deficit of attention.

They each take a cigarette out of their own packs. Changkyun has Hyungwon’s old steel lighter, Hyungwon strikes a match and watches the flame reach his fingertips with careless curiosity. Noise pours into the salon with three windows open, and it’s calming, just whispering and hissing and whooshing of the tires and rustling of the wind, arrhythmic exhales and morning sunshine in the air. 

Thin yellow rays peek through the tall pines, blinking into Hyungwon’s face. They fill his brown eyes with gold. As if accepting a challenge, Hyungwon doesn’t blink back, only the pillows under his eyes lifted in a squint, and he stares into the morning, tranquil even without his high. His lips, too plush and pink for someone so vagrant, form an extra curve when they wrap around the cigarette. His cheeks are honeyed in uneven patches from being in the sun too much on a normal day. The gentle slope of his nose is honeyed too.

Metaphors in song-writing aren’t Jooheon’s thing, but if there’s any poetry that can describe Hyungwon in Jooheon’s eyes then it’s wordless music. Maybe someone at Woodstock can tell him the right lyrics. 

They drive for another silent half hour, they acquire some company of hippie vans and more youngsters on the road. It’s not a race despite how obvious it is that everyone’s only driving to one place. Hyungwon is taking a nap on Changkyun’s lap, Changkyun is skimming through an old newspaper Jooheon found in the glove compartment. The troops haven’t left Vietnam yet, Brian Jones hasn’t died yet, Canada’s contraception practices haven’t been legalized yet, and it’s all about how many deaths can a single riot outnumber. Last half a year of the decade, and Jooheon can’t decide whether it’s changed for the better or not. Maybe nothing will ever change for the better. 

When they reach the sign with the town’s name, none of the world matters. Driving along the countryroad, they are far from alone – if on the highway they were greeted with a peace sign every other mile, then here they are going side to side with fellow attendees. 

“Guys, look,” Jooheon calls. Changkyun drops his concentrated frown and looks up, Hyungwon shifts awake, sits up, they gawk out of the windows – at the row of cars and vans steadily treading past little country houses. 

“Told you guys we had to leave early,” Changkyun says, opens the window and peeks out. It’s not standstill but for miles ahead, the road is a layer of steel roofs, for now calmly moving along towards the farm. Some are blasting music on the radio, some are just shouting, some people are walking and throwing happy greetings to every passing vehicle, freedom festival! Have a good day! If you get stuck in traffic, leave the car and join us!

Hyungwon rolls down his window and waves at every single pilgrim, okay! Do you think Dylan will come? We got food and pot, come join us if you run out! Changkyun slaps his knee and widens his eyes at him, threateningly. Hyungwon giggles in reply and turns back to the street, the weather promised to be shitty, I hope they can still perform! And Jooheon just tries to keep his eyes on the road. 

“The festival isn’t for another two days,” Jooheon says. This is getting frustrating, stressful, how big is the crowd, will they get in, will they have enough food, if they won’t have enough food then can he smoke pot and fight the munchies, what about the toilet, what if he needs to take a dump, what if he collapses due to malnutrition and busted bladder, what if––

“Relax, man,” Changkyun says. Jooheon’s knuckles are white, his breathing is a little too loud. “I’ll wave the tickets around, we should get a parking spot.” Changkyun loves these people, he loves the chaos of immense crowds, and he seems so at peace with the prospects of getting run over by the herd of rock’n’roll fans, and it doesn’t fully flatten Jooheon’s electrified nerves.

Hyungwon doesn’t care. He is smiling to himself like he always does, looking at what’s in front of him rather than ahead. At least they are moving. For now, they are moving. 

They do manage to move into the farm, along the country road running through the woods, alongside long-haired youth and not-so-long-haired and not-so-youth folks. Through the haze of his own mind, he brings them to the land that will serve the duty of freedom and music for the next five days.

“We got tickets, can we get the parking too?” Changkyun shouts through the window, aggressively waving around their three-day passes in front of no one in particular. There are workers still setting up the fences, panicky and messily, because, Lord, there are at least tens of thousands people in here already, and doubtfully all of them have the tickets. One kind man throws his arm in the general direction of the road.

They’re already driving on the ground, where the pavement ends there starts a gathering of people. On a little grass patch along the road people are setting up tents. It’s hard to see ahead but they must be close, the crowd grows bigger, the traffic is getting slower. They are still moving but every once in a while they stumble over a parked car, or maybe abandoned, and this is terrifying, but then they are past the trees, and there it is.

The land.

On a huge field to his left is the temporary homeland to all outcasts of this chained-up society, to rockers and high school kids, to reckless freaks and restless radicals, and also people like Jooheon who just wanted to get dazed in peace and sell his soul to the music, if only for a little while. 

Except on the land this big, with endless crowds and what seems to be a million tiny specks of people already sitting in front of the makeshift stage, among shirtless boys and girls in fringe bras, all white but tanned, some in baseball caps, some with patterned headbands around their heads, some are nursing beers and mod clothes, some are rolling tobacco at their bare feet. Jooheon drives under an unsecured bridge that leads to the stage, past fences segregating a perfect neat meadow. It must be for the performers – a few guards stroll near white trailer vans, there are no tents and it’s too damn clean.

“Just down the road, Jooheon, there,” Changkyun says, pointing ahead. On the tip of his nail he can see another tiny streak of gravel in front of the woods. A few cars are already parked there, a few tents set up, people resting or pacing back and forth. It takes them way too long to reach the damned patch of grass, navigating through stray folks and slowly passing by too big a field. More tents are scattered further away from the stage, more cars abandoned along the road. 

Jooheon may believe in the Lord but he does not believe in miracles, and maybe he will consider a change of beliefs because it truly is a miracle when they finally reach the improvised parking space. 

There are dozens of hippie vans here already, high youth is resting inside or by the wheels on the ground or right on the roofs of their vehicles, some couples are having breakfast on the hoods of their cars, some are setting up tents or resting right in the sleeping bags. They brought both, along with many blankets and even pillows. Jooheon is prematurely scared for their state at the end of their stay. 

From where they’re standing, they can see the stage from what seems to be a miles’ distance, and a thin row of people camping right in front of it. How they will keep it up for the next five days, Jooheon doesn’t really want to know. 

Changkyun opens the car door with force and gets out to open the trunk. Jooheon leaves his seat too, stretches his limbs and neck. He smokes, because somehow it always feels better taking a puff out in nature. His body is slowly letting go – of growing anxiety, of intrusive thoughts, of endless what-ifs and hows and whats and wethers. Hyungwon is slumped in his seat, looking out at him through the window, smiling lightly. His gaze shifts downwards, checking out the grass. It’s damp and patchy, half earth, half greenery, hard and uninhabitable even for worms. There’s another car parked just a few feet away; it feels like a disturbance of privacy.

What Changkyun gets out of the trunk is three wrapped up sandwiches, the simplest ones Jooheon could make, cheese and tomato, and probably some sauce they use in England. “Jooheon,” Changkyun calls. Fitting his cigarette between his teeth, he settles back into his driver’s seat, without closing the door. 

Changkyun is distributing sandwiches to each of them, Hyungwon takes his with a lazy hand, smiling down at it, and in Jooheon’s is a piece of lettuce he doesn’t know how it got there. 

“It’s good to eat before taking,” Changkyun says. Right, Jooheon realises. Hyungwon, despite his stone-cold atheist views, believes in spiritual achievement through acid. Or it could be just an excuse. Changkyun, despite the old gilded cross hidden underneath his t-shirt, believes in unimaginable planes of existence available only for artists like him. He wonders if Jooheon is listed on the guest list. 

Changkyun chomps his sandwich in a few bites – large bites with his front teeth, quick chewing, strange way of swallowing with his eyebrows raised in an almost tortured expression, as if he didn’t chew well enough. Despite the hurry, eating Changkyun is probably the calmest Changkyun that exists. He is just really hungry.

Hyungwon separates the two slices of bread, tomatoes in one hand, cheese in the other. He swirls one half into a roll and shoves it into his mouth, chews slowly, like a foal, slumped in his seat like the process of consuming food is the hardest thing he’s ever done in life. Jooheon quirks an eyebrow at him. Hyungwon smiles with his cheeks full; he looks kind, a little like a saint, a little like a warm neighbourhood grandpa. Jooheon doesn’t break eye contact as he bites on his own sandwich, Hyungwon blindly swirls his second slice and messily shoves it into his mouth. 

It’s a strangely relieving thought that Jooheon doesn’t care if cops or security catch them in the act. There is no authority that would care about it for miles. Their neighbours are smoking pot. 

Hyungwon takes out a sheet of blotters out of his thin hippie shoulder bag. They each take one, Jooheon looks at the tiny part of The Rolling Stones logo on his palm with hesitation. “You wanna take a full one?” Hyungwon and Changkyun turn to look at him. “It’s early morning, there’s tons of people around.” All he is worried about, really, is the probability of a surge of energy so extreme he will start running around. And running around in a field full of strangers is not a good idea.

In reply, Changkyun puts the tab on his tongue and closes his mouth with a deadpan expression. Hyungwon copies. Jooheon sighs but does the same, giving up so quickly as if he didn’t mean to even put up a fight at all. They don’t tongue it, just swallow right away. Hyungwon smiles with a little hum and slumps in his seat again. He looks outside, at the patchy grass. Without another word, he gets out of the car and carelessly lies down on the ground. 

He smiles at the sky, with the kind of joy that comes within him, with the kind of joy that says, how lucky are we to be alive! How lucky are they to not be drafted, to not be targeted by the cops, to not be excluded from the layer of society they truly want to belong to – artists of peace. Hyungwon lies down on the hard weary earth and waits for the high with carelessness of a man that completely lost touch with the material world. Maybe he was never from this world in the first place. 

Changkyun joins him, lays to his right, and smiles, faintly, in a way that spreads his little mouth into a languid line and turns his hard gaze friendly. In the very heart of New York, there are rarely any days when Jooheon can go to the park and enjoy the last days of summer’s sun on the warm grass, drinking cheap wine and listening to the boys reading their favorite books. Changkyun is too self-conscious to enjoy free time in the park. Hyungwon is too fond of his bed and his friends’ hippie van to bother taking a break from the buzzing of music on the record player. 

Miles outside of New York City, there’s nothing else to do but enjoy the endless fields and dirt of the pastures. 

So Jooheon gets out of the car and lies down to Hyungwon’s left. The sky is beautiful indeed – cloudless, bright, nothing before his eyes but a cloth of morning blue. The earth is hard under his head and his butt. He hears mumbles of people around them, hears the doddering of slow cars, hears bohemian artists sing for their soul’s joy. There’s strange smells in the air, passing by his nose on and off. It’s uncomfortable but it should get better.

Something slips into his right palm. It’s Hyungwon sneaking his fingers between Jooheon’s, pressing their palms together, so they can hold hands. He is smiling, not in the state of euphoria yet, but on the eve of the high, in anticipation of it. He always seems so happy, he must have never experienced a bad trip. Jooheon hopes he can talk to the Lord. 

The three of them are holding hands. Hyungwon’s thumb tenderly strokes the back of his hand, the sensation warming, and most of Jooheon’s focus gathers in that tiny patch of skin. Some time passes in unconscious abstraction, Jooheon catches himself playing unknown tunes in his head to fill the wait, and then the thumb stops.

Hyungwon exhales. “Oh.”

Jooheon flops his head to look at him, looks at Hyungwon’s side profile and the curl of his delicate lashes, and is suddenly overcome with giggles. Oh, he says. Hyungwon’s mouth is parted, and from what Jooheon can see, he is searching for something in the sky. His gulps are loud, Jooheon hears his tongue separate from the roof of his mouth, glide over his molars and take a resting position at the roof again. The grass under his ear is tickling. Oh, Hyungwon says. 

“Jooheon’s giggling,” Changkyun says with an audible smile in his voice. Jooheon turns to look back at the sky.

It’s bluer than the blue of Twiggy’s eyes, it’s the blue of Jooheon’s eyes, clear right underneath his irises. There are people walking, passing by, pacing from his shoulders to his stomach, hopping right across it; motors fart fireworks, bang, bang, bang, like tennis balls inside his skull. For some reason, the ground is his silky bed sheets, so soft it’s ticklish. Hyungwon’s heartbeat is beating out rhythm against his palm, through his palm. 

It’s slowly starting to make sense, the other forms of life. Jooheon can’t see them but he can hear them, the cranky chorus of the oaks behind him, the pining of the tall pines piloting the strangers, the echo of the esoteric elms. These flowers of nature are embarking for life, they reach their crooked hands for the sun and beg for survival, but all the sun does back at them is send particles and particles of air and tell them – breathe. 

As if on command, these particles of air start bubbling life in front of Jooheon’s eyes, the blue is pixelating, mutating into a sample on a petri dish, looked at from the view above, from beyond the moon, from beyond the galaxy, if such exists. And if the sky is a splatch, is Jooheon just a bacteria? Is he a single-cell micro-micro-microorganism, uselessly wiggling about in search of something to construct? He is not an atom, he doesn’t build; he is not an electron, he is no fun; he is not a nucleus, not the center of the world, then is he even matter? _Does_ he even matter? Is his existence sufficient enough in volume to produce at least some kind of energy, some kind of force, some kind of movement? 

The Lord behind the microscope, do you even see him? What’s the purpose of the bacteria in the physical world? If he is just one among millions and millions of others in the swarm, why give him the ability to question it? The Lord behind the microscope, what would it take for you to answer my questions?

The particles of air seem to expand, and someone starts playing _I’m a Believer_ – another hippie or the voice of god? Suddenly, he can't care less. Oh, if only he could see her face – is she the Lord? The Lord with tits and bright red lipstick adorning her mouth. Is it her blue eye behind the microscope?

Suddenly, she fits herself into those millions and millions of air bubbles, her face beautiful, her lips indeed red, her eyes a neon kaleidoscope. The millions of her float around, looking at him but never quite reaching. Some bubbles descend, closer and closer to his face, and if only he could separate which hand is his and which is the boy’s next to him, he could possibly reach out to her. But then she swims up above, towards the blue glass of her microscope, and he is left thirsting. 

Pretty woman, don’t walk on by. Pretty woman, don’t make me cry. Do these hippies ever stop singing? But what does he see? She’s walking back to him. She is singing, her voice a purple viscous rendition of Roy Orbison. It’s funny. He will never forget the pretty woman, but he can’t twist his tongue to name the hand he is holding.

The Lord’s face is the face of the sky – pink cheeks with spirals and green lips, strawberry blonde hair with modest curls on her shoulders. Her lips start moving, swirling into electric vowels and flattening with bass drum consonants. Her voice, the voice of the Lord, comes in invisible rays. It gives him the same feeling as when he’s listening to _Mr Sandman_ by The Chordettes on a broken record player – way too low, way too slow, yet scarily in tune. Unsettling in tune, pam, pam, pam, like slashes of purple blade across the sky. The thunder is coming. If not today, then tomorrow for sure.

Air bubbles burst, the Lord’s face with them. The rain is acidic, yellow and it stings. It hurts his eyes, and he feels like he’s covered in a storm of sand. Thanks, Lord. Way to make a bacteria feel worthy.

Worthy. It echoes throughout his body. With the air bubbles burst, he can now exit the atmosphere. He is not trapped inside the glass on the petri dish, he is not looking right into the microscope. The hollow eye of the Lord stares back at him, way too close, way too big, and then it just disappears. She leaves her laboratory, the Lord, she no longer wants to observe him. The Lord left him, alone in the universe, left to rot among the swarm of other bacterias. 

But, if the Lord no longer cares for him, why care about what’s predestined for him? It has never been her great design to walk him through the city of chaos and war and pain, make him suffer on the crossroad of impossible decisions, put him in the middle of the road and switch the pedestrian light to red. He is what he is. He has a name, and he doesn’t have a purpose. 

Why can’t he make himself an electron? Why did he decide that he can’t take an electric guitar and make his life fun? Is he not fun? Is he not the name his boys moan, is he not the calloused hand on an ancient piano, is he not the voice that vagabonds come to listen to at night when he is serenading on the fire escape stairs? 

He can be an electron. He is the surrounding force of the nucleus, he binds the positives and negatives together, makes them – a building force of reality. He is not a militant, he is not a pacifist, he was just blind, but now he sees. No matter how beautiful and gruesome our planet is, it is what it is – a reality where we will always be divided. They are the world that failed to build the Tower of Babel, and they will forever be scattered, unable to come to one single aim, and right now, he is standing right on top of it, and he knows that the Lord doesn’t care. They broke apart. Not the Lord. They did. 

We did. 

There is dryness in his mouth, and he hears it – his own voice. When did he start speaking, he doesn’t know, but the fact is now his voice is the voice of the stars and the neighboring galaxy, and he is finally an important element in the universe. He is the electron. He is…

“Except… electrons are negative. Electrons are the balance to protons. The negative to positive. I am, I am a neutron. I don’t have an electrical charge. I am just there. Geez, what’s the point of neutrons? What’s the point in having a neutral force when no one ever listens to the neutral force? Here you have Goonie, the fun, tiny electron, that whoosh-whooshes around with this giant minus sign, I can smell the metal on you, you believe everything that is wrong with the world is wrong because of the authority, but who made the authority? Is kill for a kill really your motto? Do you really believe people will listen? We are all just puny, miniscule particles of the society that fell way before the world even came to existence. We were composed of positives and negatives, we never needed the neutrals, there has never been a green line, there will always be the tropical sea and the arctic ice, the pink and the turquoise, you mix them up you get war, not yellow. We just need to use the existing colors to paint the picture, and then we will see the world for what it is, and this is how you achieve peace – by seeing the truth. See the damn truth, Goonie, there will always be carnage and prosperity, side by side. All we can do is sit in the junkyard and watch it rot.”

Napalm clouds form purple cars in the sky. He is back on the sheets of nature, and his mouth is buzzing with too many words. Someone is dancing salsa on his lips, he needs to open them again, but then there is a portrait of Salvador Dali in his sky, specifically his forehead. He follows it – it’s Changkyun who rose on his elbows, next to the hippie body that keeps silently staring into his cosmos.

His cosmos.

He is the master of his universe. 

Changkyun’s lips spread in a static smile, it melts into his cheeks, and his eyes are two bright spheres that twinkle in the night. He is radiating the luminescence of joy. “The junkyard is the neutral side, Jooheon. Neutron is the stabiliser of the nucleus, and the nucleus is composed of protons. Without neutrons, we would be nothing but air, man, the neutral side is not the sideless side. It’s a side against the positive side, the side that fights for the better. Neutral side is the stance that keeps the positives fighting, man. That’s why we are held together. The positives are the reason there is even truth in this world. And yeah, man, I do believe people will listen. I’m not the only one who believes this world is worth fighting for.”

He slides back into the ground. The wavelengths of his voice keep floating around, drumming against the dome of the glass sky and evaporating into the atmosphere. 

“This world has been lost for years.”

Jooheon, having found his name, slowly turns his head to the side. The hippie’s side is all outlines, his static runs from his face along his torso and dies out in the middle like a spark. He smells like metal. His voice, his sounds that barely carry any weight, now fall out of his mouth like a medieval cannon. Heavy. Falling straight through the dark matter. 

“There’s nothing left fighting for. If you so desperately need to achieve peace, you build your own. In another universe.” He raises his right hand in the sky, it’s pulsating like a hypnotic vision. He brings it to his face, checks his melting nails. His fingers flinch, as if shaking something off. “They won’t ever let you be something in what’s already established. You have to be your own. None of it matters, anyway, every single universe is the same – hierarchical. Even gay sex is hierarchical. I can’t even pronounce the word hierarchical. Even death has order. The only way you can bear this world is if you’re wholly singular in your own, where there is no one else, just you, the community of you, the union of you. And your atom analogy is stupid, you can’t compare the depths of humanity to chemistry.”

It’s not the echo of his voice that rings under the dome, it’s the movements of his stale mouth. Jooheon hears the wavelengths of life passing by between the three of them, or maybe more, or maybe no one at all. They each rush in different directions but always come back to the same place. They run in circles, and the circles form a sphere around them, just the three of them.

Maybe Hyungwon is the electron, whirling around the nucleus because he doesn’t believe he belongs there.

***

Friday morning comes after a blur of boredom and high at the same time. Their car is no longer in a bubble of mild isolation – they are in the middle of an improvised campsite, cramped in a little tent or bent in the backseat of the car. It rained earlier. Free shower, Hyungwon exclaimed, took off his shirt and stood under the stream, still, eyes closed. His long hair soaked and hung past his shoulders like worms, and when Changkyun, also shirtless and suddenly excited at the prospects of getting muddy, ruffled his greasy locks, Hyungwon looked like an abandoned dog. Skinny, underfed poodle who barked delightedly at every demonstration of affection. 

That night they shivered and attached themselves to Jooheon’s torso for warmth, which was slowly seeping out of every pore on his body. The rain didn’t clean their hair, only made Hyungwon’s frizzier and Changkyun’s – a sticky mess of melted gel. Jooheon made a heart out the two front strands that fell on his forehead.

This morning they find out the food supplies are running short, too many people, unexpected demand, have you seen this crowd? There’s no end to the field. They swallowed another three of their sandwiches and navigated through the herd of newcomers to the stage – to guard their seats for the next fifteen hours, at the least. Jooheon avoided drinking water except for when spitting out toothpaste. Potties are exactly the kind of worry he promised himself to avoid. There’s woods right behind his car all to his autonomy during the night. 

It’s hard to describe the sound of shambolic bustling – vehicles and people were one, treading in one unsteady line, to fill out what now could only be called the outskirts. They’re sitting on their asses on the ground, granted there are so many people around them that like penguins, they keep each other warm. Changkyun’s shirt is wrapped around his neck, his spine is slumped, he is smoking with his eyes closed and eavesdropping on the dudes chatting next to them. No, dude, real crack, like crystals, like actual coke, no, dude, that’s impossible, he would got busted ages ago, shit you not, dude, pounds of crack!

The corner of Changkyun’s mouth curls up. 

Hyungwon made friends with a couple of hippies, they are somehow extremely fascinated by his origins, but all he says is Oklahoma, pal, I’m from Oklahoma, as if that’s the answer they are looking for. Jooheon is sitting between them two and catching bits of conversations from everywhere, but it’s hilarious how quiet some people get when they’re high. He’s got his car keys in his front pocket, a pack of cigarettes in the other, and if the weather gets shitty, well, so be it. Hyungwon’s got a bagful of weed. 

Some guys are clinking beer bottles out of boredom, but what do you expect, it’s an ungodly hour of the morning, and we are sitting in the heart of a crowd that is hundreds of thousands people. Hundreds of thousands. If Jooheon turns around, he won’t see the end. So, he sits and patiently waits for the afternoon to strike – and maybe then everything will make sense.

Hundreds of thousands of people, and not one with a single worry. Hundreds of thousands, and Jooheon slowly lets go of judgement, feels more like them, becomes more like them, like Hyungwon and Changkyun who have found themselves in a crowd that grants them peace. It doesn’t matter what they say – this is where they belong. There is a place for everyone, there is a peace palace for every anxious mind, and this is theirs. Sitting on the hardened mud, they found a community of those who share their tunes.

Jooheon gives the stage a longing look. It could be such a place for him.

But it’s only a brief wonderment, and soon the smell of weed enters his nostrils, and Hyungwon is taking a fat joint that his new acquaintances share. He shares with Jooheon, Jooheon shares with Changkyun, then there is a funny little thought he voices.

“Communism is good in a friendly company.”

Hyungwon breaks into a fit of high-pitched cackles, or maybe just high, or maybe just off-pitched, but it makes Jooheon laugh in return. Changkyun gives him a sneaky sort of look as his lips are pursed around the joint, his cheeks sucked in.

“I ever told you my great grandpop was a king?” he says, smoke puffing out of his mouth.

Jooheon takes the paper from his hands, passes it to Hyungwon, Hyungwon passes it back to the guys. “And what does it make you?” Jooheon asks. It’s better to play along with everything Changkyun says. Why did you vandalise a building with a drawing of a crown? Did you read too many Archie Comics? No, man, I’m leaving my prints. Prince prints. So the historians will know I existed.

“The throne heir. But my name isn’t recorded in family archives.” This farm is a weird place. The more Changkyun talks, the more normal it sounds to Jooheon’s ears. He is still steaming, he is still heated, he still tries to be the biggest person in the crowd of hundreds of thousands people, but the smoke is coming off his skin, and it makes something in Jooheon’s guts shift. It’s familiar, the blazing energy of his tiny body.

“Isn’t it just because you’re from Queens?” Hyungwon asks. He is teasing, a gentle glint of dazed mischief sharpens his eyes if only just slightly.

“Shut up, Okie,” Changkyun sucks in his cheeks with incredible vigor as he smokes. Hyungwon’s shoulders tremble in silent giggles, he shares amused glances with Jooheon, and maybe it’s altered perception due to heat, or light head rush, or cramped space, but they seem extremely close. Jooheon can still smell dampness on his hair.

He leans in and puts a head on the thin shoulder. Hyungwon isn’t meant for nuzzling, doubtful he is made for hugging at all, but Jooheon has soft cheeks and soft arms and a firm torso, he doesn’t notice the discomfort. The more time he spends on the farm, the less discomfort there is. It could be shamanic weed. It could be pagans dancing around their tents, praying to their mystic gods for good weather, or it could be coming from Jooheon’s actual feelings. 

It’s nice having those for once.

Hyungwon’s shirt is old and ratty, the white of it has faded to grey, it smells like earth and smoke and accumulated sweat, and there is ideas of home in it. He is murmuring something to his new acquaintances with cheerful tones, his voice muffled with one of Jooheon’s ears being pressed into the round bone of his shoulder, and he doesn’t even care what he’s saying. His butt has grown numb, like it seems to do a lot these days.

He feels Changkyun’s stare on him. He is just looking, his tanned arms are wrapped around his bent knees, little rolls appear on the back of his neck from keeping it bent, his stomach is squished into itself, poking in rare rolls. He looks comfortable, like his butt isn’t growing numb from constant sitting. He looks too far away, too far away for Jooheon’s liking and comfort.

So he straightens and beckons Changkyun closer with a pout. Changkyun awkwardly bounces on his ass closer to his side. It immediately grows warm, the homely kind of warm, not just the summer’s heat. Jooheon puts his head on Changkyun’s shoulder. His skin is musky and damp, imprinting on the side of Jooheon’s face like morning dew. Sweaty, masculine, morning dew. 

His Lord may have tits in some dark parts of his consciousness, but all the chambers in his heart belong to stubbly knuckles and bulges in pants. At least for now, in summer of ‘69, when he abandoned the Lord before the Lord abandoned him and dedicated his hearty pining to these two… are there really any singular definitions for them?

Men. Among the crowd of god knows how many people and with the devil knows how strong of fists, he lightly rubs his cheek on Changkyun’s shoulder and raises his head. Bare inches away from his lips, the portion of his mind that cares about the people behind him is blocked by the esoteric comfort he didn’t know he could ever experience. He understands where they’re all coming from saying this is where you find peace. As abysmal as this place is, lord, he can’t care less. Look at them kids with their blank faces, high eyes, uneven tan, flowers in their hair and weapons of indulgence in their hands. They don’t care. 

They really do believe in making love, not war. 

Changkyun’s head is turned towards him, he doesn’t lean in, nor does he move away, he sees Jooheon’s eyes on his lips and parts them like it’s the subtlest thing he’s ever done. They’re small and pink and sharp and wonderful, and they disappear whenever Jooheon and Hyungwon kiss them. Despite the words they say as striking as the lightning, they are soft like some damned roses. 

Jooheon moves into Changkyun, his lips just barely brushing past the other boy’s. Changkyun sits in the same bent position and waits, fucking plays on Jooheon’s sudden neediness, challenges his changed state to the fucking limits. No, the trip didn’t cause the metanoia, didn’t unravel some parts of him he didn’t know, didn’t make him a stronger person. He has always been this way, it’s the world that told him he shouldn’t be.

Fuck you, world. No, really, dude. Fuck you in the ass doggy style. Maybe you’ll see the appeal.

He kisses Changkyun’s lips softly, breathes into the touch for seconds to count. When Changkyun doesn’t respond, he frowns and presses tighter, tries to force the kiss onto him, if furious pouting is in any way a violent force. Changkyun chuckles into his mouth, his lips curling into a smile. Then he kisses back, and once Jooheon gets what he wants, he pulls away, smiles and puts his head back on the warm shoulder. 

Just how Hyungwon had done it all the times before, he sneaks a hand into Changkyun’s, and then into Hyungwon’s, and the three of them sit there, knees pulled to their chests to occupy as little space as possible, holding hands without a care in the world. This must be what the two imagine the better world to look like. This must be the peace Jooheon has been searching for. 

***

Sure the performances start late. Closer to the evening, they welcome Richie Havens. He sings of freedom, and Hyungwon shakes his shoulders and claps his hands, he doesn’t listen with his ears but with his body and mind, they’re all high as fuck by the time the sun has simmered down. Changkyun gets to his feet, small in the crowd of the same shirtless boys but steaming, endlessly, freakishly, whether from smoke or heat or his own beating heart, Jooheon never understood. 

To the passionate strumming of the guitar, they flail and wiggle for seemingly ages, and if one sits down, the other stands up, and careless bobbling goes on and on and on. Jooheon joins whoever is dancing whenever his ass hurts, and though he barely sees anything on stage, he bops his head and claps his hands, and then sits down when it grows quiet, and then stands up again when the new artist comes. 

It’s a cycle without a name and without a purpose. Someone passes them a can of beer, and Jooheon is well-aware they shouldn’t take anything from dirty strangers, but he isn’t that well-aware of his own body, his own mind, his own existence. They’re listening to folk, they’re singing about social justice and beauties and wickedness of life, they’re playing countless guitars for countless people, and Jooheon isn’t sure if he is among the countless or if he’s singled out. His states of lightheadedness shift depending on the source – pot or hunger? Heat or exhaustion? What is too much and what is too little, and is Hyungwon daydreaming or meditating?

The sky turns grey. It’s an echo of thunder, and then droplets of water fall on their foreheads, and thousands of heads simultaneously look up, as if they all share the same mind. It starts to rain, and even if the instruments stop, the music continues in the form of hissing and thudding. They all get up. In the middle of the thick crowd that’s growing wet by the second, it’ll take them an hour to get to the car.

“We can watch the rest from the roof,” Changkyun shouts over the rain. Hyungwon wraps his arms around Jooheon’s bicep, and they move.

Changkyun stomps, mud squelches under his feet and splashes on Jooheon’s shoes. He looks under his feet – Hyungwon’s sandals are long past the state of salvation. He doesn’t care; he catches raindrops with his tongue, and when he stumbles into Jooheon, due to dizziness or high it’s unknown, Jooheon smells damp earth on his hair.

“I’m starving,” Jooheon says, or whines, he doesn’t hear. They slowly tread through the indecisive crowd in a haze, are they even going in the right direction? Are they moving at all or are they stuck in the gurgling mud like in quicksand? If Jooheon fell into quicksand right this second, he wouldn’t try to escape; he would relax and let nature take its toll on him.

The lack of worry in his mind should be worrisome. 

“I’m starving,” Hyungwon mocks and spreads in a crooked smile, and Jooheon isn’t worried about the lack of worries. Changkyun’s tobacco-stained hands wind up on his shoulders, picking at his wet t-shirt, fiddling as they push forward without a force. It must be all the pagans that conjured it, the shitty rain. Jooheon blames magic, and then blames Changkyun’s cold wet forehead on his cold wet nape for not caring. 

People are having fun soaking to the bone. Some stay seated where they were, hiding themselves under plastic covers (in vain), and some take off their clothes and accept the free shower. Those on the outskirts who were lucky enough to stay by their cars, get into their vehicles, and some try to save their tents (also in vain). Those on psychedelics believe the squelching mud is dripping gold. 

They barely find their car through the cloak of rain. Jooheon fishes the keys out of his soaked pocket, his cigarettes have long been damned, and when at last he opens the car, all their shirts and pants fly to the roof and they huddle inside. It’s humid and damp, the leather immediately sticks to their wet muddy skin, their wet muddy shoes dirty the floor and their wet muddy feet only make the situation worse as they curl into themselves, with Jooheon in the middle.

“Who’s going to the trunk to get out food?” Changkyun asks. Hyungwon hugs tighter around Jooheon’s arm and puts his wet head on his shoulder. “You’re such a little bitch, you know that?”

Hyungwon straightens his long-long leg and strikes Changkyun’s ankle with his heel, who then kicks him back and hits the front seats as a result, mud splashing on previously immaculate leather. 

“Kids, kids, is this how gentlemen behave?” Jooheon interrupts, though without much effort, too hot and surprisingly comfortable stuck between two nuzzling cold-blooded lizards. 

“You fucking gentleman,” Changkyun says with a note of mocking laughter and kisses Jooheon’s cheek. The rain drums against the windows and roof of the car, the glass is steamed up with condensation, people are trudding back and forth, some shouting, some laughing, and Changkyun doesn’t stop and keeps kissing all over the side of his face. 

Hyungwon decides to occupy the second side. Jooheon feels too good to move, he throws his head back and lets them kiss down his neck, and when clammy fingers grab his chin and turn him to face the other boy, he follows, lets them chew on his lips as if it’s honey taffy.

Hands sneak between his thighs and stomach and lie on top of his crotch, and there’s a part of Jooheon that thinks about how they’re going to clean it all later, and how gross and greasy he already feels, and how he suddenly misses the time when they could fuck comfortably in a large bed on cotton sheets, smoke afterwards on the fire escape stairs and drink coffee all night and all day long, use hands and mouths and everything god had given them, and how when they come back after days of cramming themselves into sleeping bags, they will feel high and good and ecstatic from amazing sex, but then his body doesn’t want to listen to his mind, so he puts his feet on top of the dirty shoes and lets fingers slide under the waistband.

It’s Changkyun’s fingers that circle around the tip, and it’s Hyungwon’s fingers that slide all the way down, and Jooheon’s feelings are reduced to streaks of pleasure running up and down his length whenever they touch him just right. He should be tired of bony hands anywhere on him instead of inside but his body craves it in this daze and confusion, and in this daze and confusion he misses Hyungwon’s lips, so he turns to look at him. 

They’re parted with gentle warm exhales escaping his mouth, pink and too full, calling Jooheon to move. He kisses them like he’s never kissed before. Hyungwon is bitter, there is rain on his skin, tobacco stench in his irreparable mess of hair, too pleasant warmth on his tongue. He is hungry, he eats it up, his hands barely useful for keeping Hyungwon’s head still, he starts trembling. 

Both of Changkyun’s and Hyungwon’s hands are working, over Jooheon and over themselves, and thank god the windows are fogged up. That’s what the conservatives are talking about, this is the promiscuous, perverted freaks that throw orgies and seduce innocent teenagers, oh, can they shut up already. Constipated bastards that sit in their rocking chairs by the fireplace with unsatisfied wives – Jooheon is so glad he will never be one of them. And if he ever will, he’d rather have dementia and not think back to this very moment, coming from two sets of hands on his belly in the car in the middle of a field where people constantly move back and forth right next to their windows. Let him die without a memory of this if he ever dares following the constraints of sexual pleasure.

Life without orgasms sounds like a life he really doesn’t want to think about.

Hyungwon and Changkyun follow him seconds later, Hyungwon on where a belly would be if he wasn’t so skinny, and Changkyun all over his fingers. They breathe in unison and not, Hyungwon calms down in seconds and resumes respiring with terrifying silence. Changkyun, the mouth breather that he is, accompanies the process of tucking in and relaxing with humming exhales. 

“Who’s gonna clean this shit now,” Jooheon mumbles, only half-expecting an answer and knowing that he will just have to live with that. Hyungwon forcefully tugs on the waistband of his underwear and wipes a white stain on his lower stomach. Jooheon rolls his eyes really hard and huffs out all the air in his lungs in one long loud exhale.

Changkyun brings his stained hand, the one that got himself off, to his mouth, Jooheon and Hyungwon simultaneously turn to peer at him. Changkyun doesn’t notice them initially, starts licking his fingers clean, wiping beads and streaks of come with the tip of his tongue. He glances to the side, mouth still open.

“What? It’s efficient.”

The rain stops about an hour later. It gets proper dark, the day flows into the night, and they pile their sleeping bags on the roof of the car and watch the rest of the stages from a great distance, eating the remaining sandwiches and some cold chicken. The figures on the stage are tiny, minuscule, barely there. They smoke and listen to the concert speakers. They themselves are invisible in the night. 

Some people are pacing around, some people are still camping by the stage, some people have long gone. It isn’t that entertaining when they’re tired and when folk music gets too much, but they’ve still got lots of weed left and peace of the cityless estate where they don’t have to worry.

***

Saturday starts at midday, but Changkyun doesn’t want to go into the crowd until Janis Joplin and The Who which are scheduled for the night, so they trod for the tragically depleted food point in hopes of snatching at least one plate of a meal. Hyungwon resorts to staying in the tent by the car to acid trip for the next twelve hours.

There are reporters flocking the outskirts or trying to make their way right into the heart of the crowd. Santana is already on stage by the time they get in line for the food stands. The music reaches them all the way at the back, probably miles away from the stage, where dozens of other settlements have grown over the past few days. It’s crowded, overfilled with people, nothing makes sense in the light of day on your feet, and Changkyun starts steaming up again. 

“It’s definitely free, right?” Changkyun asks. There’s gruff in his voice and a frown between his eyebrows. He hates lines despite how much he loves marching for hours during protests. 

“Don’t know, I’ve only got a couple of quarters on me,” Jooheon replies. 

It takes an hour, they leave with two hotdogs, empty pockets and no food for Hyungwon. Changkyun is smoke coming off his skin, angry bites with ketchup slashing all over his lips and wide-spaced gait. No matter how good it feels to be in the middle of the herd, listening to music for hours on end despite the humidity, the rain and insane desire for a proper toilet, it’s frustrating and unconventional and filthy all the other times, and they’re definitely not high enough for this right now. 

For a second, Jooheon entertains the possibility of leaving early. But the sights of stuffy New York, rambling news reports, showy-dressed mods and his goddamn job aren’t winning over the sights of the stuffy farm, rambling crowd of stoned hippies, shirtless Changkyun and this goddamn live music that his ears long to tune in to. 

Here he is closer to what could have been his place of belonging. Maybe fifty years from now, when this place is history long-forgotten, if he is still lucky to be alive, he would be coming here again not as part of the crowd, but the figure with a capital F under the spotlight. He thinks of himself exclusively. He doesn’t go into the labyrinth of probabilities of the other two getting out of this century in one piece. If anyone could be in his band, it would be Kihyun – the only person Jooheon knows who has his entire life under control. If not yet sorted, then at least he is walking this road with both eyes fully open, whatever that even means. 

They’re blasting and hitting it until midnight. It rains insanely every now and then, Hyungwon’s hair exists in the constant state of damp and greasy, by hour he smells less like a man and more like a woodland folklore creature. His endless daze passes onto them, Changkyun relaxes to the point he shrinks into himself, becomes the smallest in the crowd, fits on both their laps when _Summertime Blues_ plays through the nocturnal crowd.

It’s grown quieter, they have space to breathe. People are leaving, but Jooheon doesn’t even hear the fart of the motors and cracking of the metal hoods under piles of hopped-on riders. They will lay in the mud until they run out of weed, and when that happens, he will agree to face the reality again.

Hours of waiting, raining and alternating between passing out and greeting the remaining heroes on stage. Saturday night has flown into Sunday morning. A veil of grey covers the farm. They’re wet and numb, Hyungwon is sleeping in a crossed-legged position, his damp head on Jooheon’s shoulder. Changkyun makes friends with another bunch of stoners next to them, they talk about music and complain about their weed getting soaked under the rain, they blink slowly and sink a little deeper into themselves by the hour of the morning.

Then there is more music and exclamations of hallelujah, then there are Hyungwon’s smiles on a sober mind and Changkyun’s overgrown nails mindlessly tapping his lower back. It’s _Somebody to Love_ , and Jooheon either bops his head to the music or nods to the words, wants somebody to love, needs somebody to love, would love somebody to love, and then he is needy and small and tearful from exhaustion, but maybe because he is here means he had found somebody to love, and the world doesn’t seem so depressing. 

They sleep right in the crowd until the afternoon when the music starts again. Three days of the festival have turned into a phantasmagoria of endless hours, rain and smoke, nothing they did seemed like their own will; perhaps it isn’t them that’s controlling their bodies. And even when the high wears off, they look at the world around them as if through the grey-colored glasses – the rain made everything blurry, monotone, foggy, unreal. 

Storm rages in the afternoon. 

The grey of the sky and the brown of the earth mix into one, like an oil painting. Some play in the mud, some try to save themselves like they’ve been doing the past days – hiding under a plastic cover that barely did anything to keep the muck away from them. Maybe it’s the hunger, maybe it’s the effects of hourly sobriety, but Jooheon can’t trace a single thought in his head. The everlasting rain ends when he wakes up in the depth of the night on the passenger’s seat, Hyungwon and Changkyun sleeping head to head in the back.

But the music is still playing through the faraway darkness, the festival lasting long through the night. They greet the grey dawn on the roof of the car, breakfasting on the remaining pieces of bread and granola from the free stands. Jooheon is dreading the way back home – although half of the crowd has left, the traffic is bound to be insane when everyone decides to leave after Hendrix. Hyungwon is smoking away the last hours away from reality, he seems skinnier without his shirt on, his unbrushed curls hanging heavy past his shoulders, glistening, weary after days of nothing but rain. Changkyun has at least lost his ridiculous quiffs. He is content and smiling at nothing in particular.

For once his body is of human temperature. His amusement at Hyungwon’s hooded lids is lazy, his leisurely grins crooked and thin. His stomach is inflating with every easy breath, one and two, one and two, a normal amount of seconds between each, and yet in Changkyun’s terms, it’s the highest state of relaxation he can achieve. He exhales smoke in free shapes, doesn’t feel the need to strain his lips and huff out air to make the world know he exists. He is on terms with his piece.

They sit and watch people slowly leave after midday. It’s Monday, and Jooheon is meant to be at work. Tomorrow his boss will put on another entertainment show on the radio and tell him off for being careless, call him names and boast about his generosity for giving someone like Jooheon such an important job. He is only fixing some goddamn cars. He doesn’t even know how Wall Street operates.

In his head he is singing and strumming tunes to no song in particular, maybe his own, maybe someone else’s. They move with the speed of a snail, passing by the same abandoned cars and now thinned out settlements. Someone sits on the trunk, someone sits on the hood, and Changkyun sticks his head out and shouts at them. They jump off with gleeful smiles, sorry man, can you give us a ride? No, this old thing is gonna break under y’all’s asses. 

The guitar has remained untouched. 

The leather seats are in desperate need of a wash, but Jooheon doesn’t have the heart to tell Hyungwon off for putting his feet up again. There isn’t much written on his face; maybe a little sadness about coming back to the world he doesn’t think he belongs to. 

On the highway leading to the city Jooheon starts talking to no one in particular. About who he is and what he plans on doing next, about his frustration and hatred for something he is still trying to figure out. Hyungwon is terrifyingly quiet again, barely existing, like he always is; Changkyun is puffing out smoke through strained lips. The world will never change, tensions won’t stop rising, both on the country’s borders and in his shoulders. 

Who the fuck are you, Jooheon Lee? The blissful days of a worriless mind allowed him to forget the question but not solve it. 

“Did you see,” Hyungwon starts, “that boy that was drawing in his notebook? He came on the car next to us. He was sketching whatever he could see around him, from the stage to people fucking in the tent by the woods. Before Santana came on, they all went to the crowd, and he left his notebook on top of the car. Then it rained, and everything got wet, and his notebook turned to mush. He was really sketching a lot. Maybe he was on coke.” He presses his forehead against the glass window and peers in the surrounding woods as they rush past them. “Kinda sad we won’t ever see what he was drawing. He drew me too, you know. I was in the tent tripping.” He shifts facing the side completely, searching for something in the air they leave behind. “Wonder if he got my hair right.”

Jooheon feels like Hyungwon, with all his trivial wondering and unreasonable hopeless resentment for the present, is a part of a much greater history than Jooheon could ever be. He supposes there is supposed to be some greater meaning none of them really bothers to look for. It’s Monday evening, all they worry about is a good, filling dinner. 

***

Once they get to the apartment, Jooheon kicks off his shoes like his mother taught him. Hyungwon lost his sandals sometime halfway to the city. 

“Showers first!” Changkyun shouts and quickly waddles to the bathroom. 

“It’s my apartment, I shower first!” Jooheon exclaims and almost sprints to the door from the kitchen, trying to get there before the other guy. They bump shoulders in the door frame and try to fit in at the same time, grunting, fists almost coming into the fight,

“I have the most hair, let me go first!” Hyungwon shouts from the bedroom and flies into the door before it manages to shut behind the two of them.

“Exactly why you should go last!” Changkyun’s scream is muffled by the shirt he’s trying to pull over his head. Jooheon jumps around on one leg, tearing the damn jeans off his feet. His butt bumps against the door that Hyungwon pushes open, already shirtless and manically peeling the pants from his hips.

Changkyun exclaims victoriously and already climbs over the bathtub, but Jooheon grabs the shower curtain before it’s swung into his face and races him to the hot water handle. Jooheon wins. Jooheon finally wins at something.

By the time Hyungwon climbs inside and stands at the far end of the small tub, Jooheon is already standing under the stream of water with a truly satisfied, victorious grin. This is the best thing he’s felt since orgasming after a blunt. Changkyun tries to wrestle him for some hot water but a victorious Jooheon is a violent Jooheon, and he keeps his stand under the shower until the water turns from lukewarm to just plainly luke to pitifully cold. 

Jooheon regrets it half an hour later when freezing feet dig into his thighs, Hyungwon and Changkyun shake their heads so cold water from their hair splashes all over him, climb under the duvet and leave frost bites from their palms on his neck and chest and stomach and ass, and then they kiss until all of their mouths are hot and dripping.

They fuck before they have food, despite the exhaustion and mild bruising and remaining dizziness, and the fresh bed sheets are now rumpled and dank, as if they haven’t left the uncivilised wilderness at all.

Hyungwon falls asleep straight after, his fluffy curls spread all over the pillow like seaweed on the seabed. Changkyun volunteers to go across the street for a pizza, gamble to take their order back home. It’s crisp and still outside on the fire escape stairs, where Jooheon goes to smoke and think about himself if only for five minutes. The black neighborhood cat silently jumps down to his floor and crawls towards him like a nightly thief. Jooheon scratches its cheeks, its golden eyes close in pleasure.

The furry rascal seems to love him the most out of all the people in the building. Maybe he should take him, welcome him to the fuck-up of their little family, live together as four stray souls. Hyungwon would name it Liquorice, Changkyun would name it Raven and call it baby, Jooheon wouldn’t name it at all and call it kitty-kitty in a disgustingly sweet voice. Maybe he would name it John, with the lamest name he ever knows. 

There’s newspapers for him to pick up, there’s endlessly rambling TV for him to watch in his favorite coffee house a few blocks away from here, there’s his boss and underpaid shifts to deal with, his irreparably filthy clothes and shoes to clean and a couple of strings on the guitar to fix.

He should start playing again.

They leave greasy stains on the table after they eat, and who will clean it up? Not me, it’s your apartment. I’m only leaving my prints in history, so you’ll never forget I was here. There are prints everywhere: a graphite line on the wall from smashing chairs into it; a spare mug in the cupboard; endless bracelets on the dressing table and strands of long hair on the pillows; extra lighters and an ashtray on the nightstand; melted taffy in the key bowl; scratches on the wooden floor under the legs of the bed; Simone de Beauvoir in the kitchen and _Stranger in a Strange Land_ in the bathroom. 

These things won’t last for an eternity, or maybe they will. Maybe months and months from now, Hyungwon’s mom will call and ask him to come back home because his brother is sick, and he will flop his cloudy head in feigned tranquility and say that if he leaves now he will get there by tomorrow morning, and then he will ask Changkyun for the remaining dose of coke he has to help him stay awake during the ride, and maybe on the way back to New York he will take too much. Maybe months and months from now Changkyun will get drafted because systems don’t change, and before he can escape to Canada he will be found and beaten to death or sent to prison and rot there, and then maybe one of those days Jooheon’s eyes will accidentally land on obituaries in the daily paper and accompany him on his way out of the 60’s into the new era.

Maybe there will be songs playing on the radio that will remind Jooheon of specific moments in his life he doesn’t yet know if he will regret.

Nixon is still on the front page, dollar signs decorate the side column and shop windows, Soviet fights for its wrongful truth out of red anger and imperial European states imperialise further, becoming a pirate sounds like an appealing way to escape taxes, the Moon still shines despite being conquered, The Beatles will never reunite, and there is still this goddamn job to go to so his Changkyun can raid bubblegum machine again next Saturday. 

He wonders what Hyungwon dreams about in his sleep that he doesn't ever want to get out.

The summer ends in less than two weeks, and the noise of the protest under his windows only now becomes something namelessly symbolic, like that fucking California beach Hyungwon is talking about again. He wasn’t even sober when he went there.

Jooheon plops into his favorite seat in the coffee house and orders his usual.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading! hope you enjoyed, don't be shy to communicate anything you want w me C:
> 
> song references:
> 
> david bowie - [space oddity](https://youtu.be/iYYRH4apXDo)  
> the beatles - [while my guitar gently weeps](https://youtu.be/bI8P6ZSHSvE)  
> nina simone - [sinnerman](https://youtu.be/QH3Fx41Jpl4)  
> bob dylan - [the times they are a changin'](https://youtu.be/90WD_ats6eE)  
> the monkees - [i'm a believer](https://youtu.be/wB9YIsKIEbA)  
> roy orbison - [pretty woman](https://youtu.be/3KFvoDDs0XM)  
> jefferson airplane - [somebody to love](https://youtu.be/5Jj3wZVc7nw)  
> im on twt! @ [chaeleggiewon](https://twitter.com/chaeleggiewon)  
> 


End file.
